This warning does not protect us from anything. Once upon a time it helped loot get to the right people, preventing accidental pickups. Because of the two hour trading timer that protection is no longer needed. When soloing this warning is without purpose.

In the meantime, the BoP warning only harms us. It takes time. It distracts. It can cause you to lose items.

"This item will bind when picked up" was once a useful piece of information. No longer.

While I can agree with you to a point, I'm going to have to disagree overall. The warning has been great for me in terms of helping my guildies get their starting gear with items like the trinkets and necks especially from the treasures of whatsit things this expansion. When I find one of the rare items that has spawned, I can click to loot it but not confirm it, and then nobody else can touch the item until I cancel which allows me to wait for the guild member to arrive and loot it from me.

Is it annoying? Yeah, for the most part it is. However, that doesn't mean it's a complete waste. Personally, I hate binding all together even though I do see the reasons for it. I would love to see some of the binding rules further relaxed or changed a bit, though.

I think psynister means that for the time that he has the yes/no dialog box on his screen, the item is locked and nobody not even other players can loot the sparkly world item. (Consider, for example, finding the Ancient Pandaren Mining Pick in Jade Forest, and locking it down while calling for a guildmate to hustle to the mine and loot it.)

Rolling need on an item should require filling out a captcha. That would make it even less likely that you click on yes by accident. And filling out a captcha is only a few seconds. Well justified tradeoff. :)

@Bernard: What item can be bound by accident? Soloing, nothing, it's all mine. In a group we can trade. From vendors we can sell back.

Let's imagine that this does serve a useful purpose and sometimes people "accidentally soulbind" item. How often? It would need to happen every 1 in 600 (10 min x 60) times we get that warning. Note that in a 5-man, a single boss kill is 5 events; in a 25-man it goes up to 25 events per kill.

Beside all that, to call it just a second is leaving out important details. If it's a container, then I'm stuck in place for that second. In groups, during fights, it's a distraction. As a useless warning it adds to the tendency to just hit okay on anything that pops up.

@Kring: Add one of those things where it pops out a bunch of code that you have to copy-paste and you've got a good system.